When I was in the military, I made a bad decision. I didn’t realize what I had done until around four months later when I was told what charges were going to be pressed against me and it wasn’t until years later that the gravity of what happened hit me. The decision that I made ended up killing 60-70 children and around 5-10 adults. It wasn’t possible to get an accurate count because of the extensive damage. I feel like a serial killer. Anytime I smile or laugh I feel guilty…and every day it gets worse.

I have to lie every time someone asks me how I’m doing. I have to lie about what I think anytime there is a shooting or someone gets murdered because I get jealous that they only have to deal with one or a few peoples death. It has changed the way I view the world. I get a crippling sense of guilt when I’m around children. I live near an elementary school and when I see the kids out playing two things come to mind; I would do anything to give those children a chance to play again and I can’t help to imagine how many kids would be left out of the group if 60 of them weren’t there.

I feel like I can’t tell anyone this because….how do you tell someone you killed so many children and expect them not to judge you and would they even believe what I said? Sometimes I wish I had the courage to bring what happened to light. After seeing what happened to Snowden I don’t think I ever will. It makes me resent at the deepest levels how our politicians talk about making morally good decisions, yet when our military accidentally kills this many children you will have never heard about this in the news. It has left me empty knowing that this mistake was just swept under the rug. To make it even worse, I was told that I was only going to be prosecuted with 50 counts of Article 119, instead of the estimated amount. Article 119 is manslaughter. That sits with me everyday and everyday, everywhere I go I feel like I’m hiding the biggest and worst secret that anyone would think of.

I wanted help, I wanted to make this better. I know it’s only a matter of time before the demons inside me will win the fight. When that day comes, I want to be able to bring this to the public.

To this day, I walk free, knowing how many people I killed because of my decision. If anyone was on the deployment with me, two of the injuries were when one of our persons went to put the chock blocks around the tires of the plane that just landed and the tire blew up, shattering his legs. The other was when a hydraulic line blew apart and hit one of our persons in his head and he was in an induced coma for two weeks. 2005-2006